On Trajectory and the Drift of Things

Journal Entry: March 31, 2026

On Trajectory and the Drift of Things

Journal Entry: March 31, 2026

If the universe, seen and unseen, known and unknowable, is in some sense a singular being - and I suspect that it is - then one of the most striking things about it is that it is never standing still. It is continuously manifesting as uniqueness. Every moment, every location, every being, every event, every configuration is appearing only once in exactly the way it appears and then passing away forever, giving itself over immediately to whatever comes next.

Nothing is ever repeated.

There may be recurrence. There may be pattern. There may be rhythm, cycle, echo, memory, resemblance, and return in the broad sense. But the actual moment itself never comes back. It arrives, gives itself, disappears, and is gone forever. Reality seems to move like a continuously unfolding symphony - never static, never recoverable, never replayed in its original condition, and yet unmistakably carrying certain motifs forward as it goes.

One of the strangest things about existence is that it is at once utterly unstable and yet somehow coherent enough to feel continuous. Everything is always vanishing, and yet something persists. Or at least something is being carried.

Perhaps memory is part of what makes this possible. Memory, habit, pattern recognition, structural tendency, inertia, and continuity of relationship all seem to help create the impression that there is a stable world moving through time. But looked at more closely, the world may be less like a fixed set of things and more like a ceaseless process of passing away and re-forming. A living event-stream. A field of irreversible emergence.

In that sense, the whole thing may be more breath-like than object-like.

One breath leaves so the next may come in.

There is no way to hold the inhale or exhale and continue living.

There is no way to cling to the last moment and still participate in the next one.

Existence seems to require this continual surrender.

And yet this surrender is not random. It is not merely collapse into fragmentation. There is also trajectory. There is movement from where a thing was to where it is, and from there toward where it is going. There are tendencies carried forward. There are inherited directions. There are themes, habits, structures, and unfinished motions continuing through change.

This, to me, is often a more useful way of thinking about what many traditions have tried to name with the word karma.

The word karma is commonly translated as “action,” and often understood as a kind of moral cause-and-effect system in which one’s thoughts, deeds, and intentions shape future outcomes. That is not wrong as far as it goes, but I think the deeper and perhaps more practical idea is less about isolated action and more about trajectory.

Not just what was done.

But what is now moving.

What has been set in motion.

What kind of current has formed.

What pattern is being carried forward through a complex series of actions, reactions, hesitations, reinforcements, and turns.

Trajectory includes consequence, of course, but it also includes direction. It includes momentum. It includes accumulated tendency. It suggests that what matters is not merely a ledger of separate acts, but the overall line that is forming through them.

That is a very different and, I think, more useful picture.

Imagine a pile of leaves thrown into a river together.

The current takes them all downstream, but not in a fixed arrangement. Some remain close for a while. Some drift apart. Some catch against rocks. Some gather again in eddies. Some are separated permanently. Others pick up twigs, foam, petals, and stray fragments as they go. Then perhaps the whole mass goes over a waterfall and what had briefly looked like a stable arrangement explodes into apparent chaos.

And yet even then, something continues.

Some pieces rejoin downstream. Some do not. Some are carried into side channels. Some are caught in reeds. Some are drawn back into the main current. The original pile is irrecoverably gone, and yet the movement continues carrying forward traces, tendencies, residues, alignments, and possibilities born from everything that happened upstream.

That feels much closer to how life actually works.

We are not fixed things moving through time intact.

We are dynamic patterns drifting through conditions.

Even what we call identity may be less solid than we imagine. We are continuously losing and reconstituting ourselves. Every day certain thoughts fall away, certain attachments loosen, certain cells die, certain assumptions dissolve, certain memories fade, certain desires lose force, and other things gather around the current. We are not the same person from one season to the next, and yet there is enough carried forward that a recognizable trajectory remains.

That is a very interesting kind of continuity.

And perhaps it is one of the reasons artists are so preoccupied, whether consciously or not, with sequence, form, coherence, and drift. Because creative work is made precisely within this condition. One does not make from stasis. One makes from the moving edge.

A work begins as an intuition, an image, a phrase, a rhythm, a scrap, a hunch, a pressure. Then it enters time. It drifts. One follows it, loses it, regains it, mistakes it for something else, overworks it, strips it back, rediscovers the line, loses confidence, regathers, revises, and gradually tries to keep the thing from dispersing beyond recovery before it has fully taken form.

That is a real part of the craft.

Artists, writers, performers, composers, filmmakers, choreographers, and thinkers are all, in one way or another, involved in the management of drift.

The drift of attention.
The drift of intention.
The drift of mood.
The drift of meaning.
The drift of aesthetic.
The drift of confidence.
The drift of the original pulse that first made the work feel alive.

A great deal of artistic maturity consists not in forcing the work rigidly into submission, but in learning how to keep enough of the original trajectory intact while allowing the living process of transformation to occur. That is a delicate discipline. Too much control and the work dies from overhandling. Too little and it disperses into formlessness. One must learn how to stay in relation to the current without pretending one can freeze it.

That may be one of the reasons art feels so close to life itself.

Because life also does not permit us to keep things in their original arrangement.

Everything drifts.

Relationships drift.
Projects drift.
Worldviews drift.
Bodies drift.
Nations drift.
Attention drifts.
Civilizations drift.
Even spiritual understanding drifts if it is not tended.

And so perhaps one of the central tasks of a serious creative life is not merely expression, but the tending of trajectory.

That is a phrase worth keeping.

Because if one understands the creative life as the tending of trajectory, then the task becomes clearer. One asks less often, “How do I control everything?” and more often, What is the line I am trying to keep alive here? What current is this work part of? What direction is my life actually moving in beneath all the local fluctuations? What tendencies am I reinforcing? What patterns am I feeding? What small acts of care or neglect are gradually altering the downstream shape of things?

These are not dramatic questions, but they are profound ones.

And they also return the artist to a more realistic relationship with process. One does not need to solve the whole river. One only needs to remain close enough to the current to notice when the drift has become too severe and to make whatever subtle correction is possible while there is still time.

That is true of a paragraph.
It is true of a painting.
It is true of a friendship.
It is true of a body of work.
It may even be true of a soul.

If the universe itself is a singular being manifesting through irreversible change, then perhaps what we are doing, each in our own local and partial and particular way, is learning how to move consciously within that unfolding. Not by clinging to fixed forms, and not by surrendering entirely to chaos, but by developing enough sensitivity to feel what is being carried forward and enough discipline to participate in its shaping.

That, to me, feels like a very practical kind of wisdom. Not control. Not certainty. But a good and steady hand on the drift.

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